


you have made me divine

by ilia



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: And just their. Inexhaustible love for each other., Blood and Injury, Character Death, F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sex, Violence, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-16 08:47:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29451009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilia/pseuds/ilia
Summary: Edelgard and Hubert share moments through time as they fight for the future they believe in.-But for now they will remain, as always, as ever; side-by-side, Edelgard and Hubert face the dark terror of tomorrow and breathe the blood carried by the winds and understand themselves on the brink of something broken.
Relationships: Edelgard von Hresvelg/Hubert von Vestra
Comments: 4
Kudos: 21





	you have made me divine

**Author's Note:**

> Phew! This is the longest thing I've written in ages and at this point I still can't decide if it's good or not, but it's too many words to lose. Please please mind the tags, and thank you for reading <3

Edelgard and Hubert are alone, and the corners of her room crawl with invisible, inexplicable dangers.

The sun has set hours prior; with the lengthening of the shadows and the retreat of warmth, the dark corners of Edelgard's bedroom deepen until she cannot see what might hide therein. It's in these moments, she thinks as she quivers upon her velveteen bedding, that the world seems especially dangerous indeed.

Argument peels from the space underneath her closed door. Edelgard’s little, trembling fingers yank a blanket to her chin. Nearby her cheek throbs, red and angry and swollen. Tomorrow her uncle’s handprint will gleam against Edelgard’s porcelain skin.

“My Lady.” A hand comforts her, sugar white and barely larger than her own, and still the little Princess Edelgard finds herself leaning her injured, round cheek against the palm. Because she knows this hand well, for it belongs to Hubert, and Hubert, unlike her wretched uncle outside, has never reached towards her with the intent to harm. “My Lady,” Hubert says again. “Don’t you worry. You’re safe where you are.”

“I hate him.”

“As is your right.” At the age of nine, Hubert has rather perfected the crease between his eyebrows that shows concern in the unique manner he’s learned from his father, but certainly never because his father was concerned for him. “But they won’t come for you again. Not while I am at your side.”

Before when she'd screamed, he’d come running, and Edelgard does not have the forethought at this young age to ask just how he got to this wing of the Keep so rapidly. All she knows is that she’s glad he did, glad he slipped into her bedroom with those quiet feet and cautious eyes. They may be children, but she feels safe beside Hubert. Safer than she’s felt with an adult.

Edelgard flinches as a deeper bellow joins the voices in the next room over. "And if they do?"

Hubert looks at her with seastill eyes. “Then I will kill them where they stand.”

_Irrational_ , she might comment, were they enjoying teatime in the Imperial Gardens and not hiding from adults in her moonlit bedroom. _Stupid_. But threaten it time and again, that resolute determination has never once faded from Hubert’s face.

But she doesn't think of it too deeply, and perhaps the better for it. For Edelgard is six years old, and she is too young to understand what the lump in her throat means when her friend makes threats of death. She is six years old and afraid of the shadowy corners of her room and of her uncle and knows that even though sometimes Hubert promises to murder for her, his hands are soft.

She looks at him and wonders if he might kill for her, he a boy of merely nine with weeds for arms and crow's feathers for hair. He, her retainer, a word she doesn’t quite understand yet but knows to mean vaguely that he is _hers_. The thought comforts her as the voices from the hallway beyond her door lull.

"Then do whatever you must," she tells him, violet eyes meeting his own. And she shifts so that their hips are aligined, so that she might lean her uninjured cheek upon his bony shoulder. "So long as you don't leave."

Their fingers lace upon her lap, and there they stay until the pinking of sky outside her windows spells the safety of day.

-

Edelgard and Hubert are alone, and yet the threat of eyes drags along the back of her neck.

There is something quieting about the smell of old parchment, Edelgard thinks fondly, careful fingers trailing down the page of an older tome. This one, too, fished from the corners of the Garreg Mach Library, tucked deep into her bag and far away from any wandering eyes. Now in the privacy of Hubert’s quarters she allows it loose: battle tactics and strategy of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus.

The diagrams are as intricate as they are bloody, and yet Edelgard had been quick to dismiss Hubert's insistence to study the gorier pages himself. She will need to acquaint herself with the realities of war sooner rather than later if they are to see their plans to fruition. She will need to not retch at death. To not remember at the sight of crimson the way thick, warm blood had once lapped at her in the immersive black as she had screamed, as her hair had whitened and her insides shredded as her second Crest had taken hold—

He’s stolen some candles from the kitchens, she notes as Hubert lights another. The light resonates off the stone walls and bone-dry pages, off the strict and unwavering lines of Hubert’s face. He looks tired, Edelgard thinks with something of a pang. But as of late Hubert always looks tired.

“Have you yet ceased your attempts at staying awake through to morning, Hubert?” It’s the first time either of them have spoken in hours, and for it her throat is raw. She clears it now. “I trust you are quite satisfied nobody will sneak into the academy to do away with me in the dead of night.”

“Perhaps they will not come from outside the academy at all,” Hubert rebutts, hardly looking up from his own page where his quill is jotting neat, curt notes. “There are enemies all around us, my Lady. Enemies closer than a floor away; enemies within reach of you at practically every moment. I will _not_ be faulted for my wariness.”

Edelgard lays down her own pen. So late is the hour that her eyes ache from the strain. She will need glasses soon, assuming Hubert allows her to a physician for examination. Assuming he might just once relinquish the suffocating hold he’s kept on her since her return to Adrestia those years prior.

“Enemies with whom you willingly socialize?” She gauges, lips tight and face controlled as his sharp gaze flickers in her direction. Might they be any more awake, she may treat this too as a game; the methodical, logical manner in which Edelgard and Hubert work their bodies and words to test the other. For life is ever the tactical challenge; for it keeps them both on their toes. For in their lives they will be subject to more than sneaking tomes on Northern battle strategy into his bedroom, to huddle and whisper of _what if we started a war; what if we tore this world to shambles; what if we began anew._

Despite his exhaustion, Hubert appears impressed. “You know what they say about keeping your enemies close.”

“So you do it for us.”

“I do it for you, Lady Edelgard,” Hubert corrects drily, and returns once again to his work.

Edelgard settles her jaw upon her palm, turned expressly away from him, so that he will not see the curious warmth upon her cheeks.

The monastery is quiet as a tomb, she thinks to distract herself, and in that quiet Edelgard finds trouble relaxing, trouble sleeping, trouble _being_. She’s long used to the bustle of Enbarr, the noise of people, of her people, that rises from the streets to the turrets beyond. Here at the monastery there is only the breath of autumn wind through the pines beyond her window; the drip of wax onto Hubert’s table.

Even then, it is some time before she realizes he is no longer working either.

Rather. When Edelgard turns to Hubert, his gaze collides with her own. As though he was looking.

_As though he was watching her._

Edelgard concatenates the pieces of herself those eyes knock loose. Damn her sentimentalities. Damn her weak nature, for when their professor stands in front of the class and lectures and Hubert reaches to her to note something of interest he retreats to his side of the desk leaving her constitution in shambles.

Damn the way she has not longed much of Enbarr for the way home is tangled not in that city but in the threads of his coat, the yarn of his voice.

“Lady Edelgard,” Hubert begins.

“I've told you before, Hubert; I would have you call me Elle.”

“ _Elle_ ,” Hubert corrects. And the grate of her nickname across his tongue has her chest tightening rather ferociously. "Ultimately, these are trivial concerns. Hardly worthy of your valuable attentions. I would have you focus on your courses and training rather than on my own habits."

"And have my retainer dead on his feet? I think not." Edelgard's brow lifts, the better to chastise him. "I will decide what is worthy of my own attentions, I think. And I am not beyond commanding you to care for yourself should the need arise."

He grimaces. “If you would command me to rest, I could not stop you.”

“But would you obey? I think not. I suspect you'd stay awake anyway,” Edelgard returns. And Hubert's wry smirk is all the validation she needs. “I would rather honesty over the false comforts of my wishes being fulfilled.”

“As you command.”

The slick slide of wax resumes its resounding chorus in the silence spun between them both. Edelgard looks at Hubert and wonders if, upon catching a shadow creeping into her rooms at night, he might kill for her then and there. If she might be afforded the horror of watching it herself.

_The honor of it,_ a part of her whispers, a part of her too deep and too ugly to allow loose.

The candle sputters and dies and in that instant, Edelgard and Hubert are immersed in dark.

“Damn,” Hubert breathes, and the room fills with the rummaging sounds of his fingers for matches.

The dark is permeating, eviscerating. And it's only moments before Edelgard notices the way her nails dig into the flesh of her palms, the sweat on her brow. There's something about this dark that is unsettling her. She closes her eyes and opens them again and still there is only that suffocating black.

And before she can help it, she has been seized, been pulled back in time as though it were only yesterday her knees ached from the stone dungeon floor, when the wet reek of blood filled her nose, when she was nothing but little and cold and hurting and the cries of her kin rang out from around her.

Her breath catches in her throat.

“ _Hubert_."

Perhaps something to do with the timbre of Edelgard’s voice. Perhaps the uncanny way she asks for him. For Edelgard bears the Crest of Flames; she is the heir to the Imperial throne. Edelgard does not simply ask for help erroneously. She has not since her rebirth from that black pit with silver hair and a body covered in scars and a mind blemished and bruised.

“Another instant and the light will be back,” Hubert reassures her, low and steady. As though he knows how much she hates to _need_.

“I am not afraid.” By the moment, it grows harder for her to breathe.

“To be frightened is human," he says in turn, through the dark. “That you can fear is as much a strength as any other.”

“Don't be asinine. It's a limitation."

“Then embrace your limitations. It is I who should be concerned with them. Or have you forgotten my promise already?”

There is a rustling as his fingers probe his pockets for the match; Edelgard blinks, and her eyes adjust. The panic swollen in her throat subsides somewhat as the sliver of moon from beyond her window casts shape into the void. With its help, Edelgard can make out Hubert’s form.

She thinks of Hubert in her quarters, Hubert waiting in the dark for any dangers that might befall her. She thinks of Hubert painted crimson with the blood of her enemies. She thinks of his promise, of the path he will lay in her name.

She reaches for him before she can think better of it. For a fraction of a moment, their fingers curl and thread tight atop the wooden table.

Warm, is her first thought, and how _endearing_ to find this callous man to have blood that pumps underneath that sallow exterior. Warm, and sure, as his gloved hands wind more securely around hers. His fingers tight between hers, his thumb deep into the middle of her palm, and her stomach knots with the wonderful sensation of it. And it is enough, this coveted touch, that for an instant she forgets she has been plunged into black once again.

“May I have back my hand?” He asks through the dark. And perhaps good for it, lest he see the way her cheeks _burn_. “I do need both to strike the match, you see.”

As quickly as it had begun, her fingers shrink from his. The flare of his match brings reason to chaos. Edelgard blinks, and straightens her uniform jacket. She tells herself the warmth of his fingers means nothing.

She shuffles her papers erroneously, and nabs another tome from the pile on his table. She will feel the way his fingers had wrapped around hers for days.

-

Edelgard has not seen Hubert in nigh a week, and occupied as she might have been, his absence is a weight in her gut.

The daylight grates across her senses as their grouping emerges from an innocuous stone entryway; some leagues down the pathway below, Edelgard knows to be Abyss. Miles of winding, darkened tunneling and sewage that smells of growth and green and misuse, peppered with characters who hate vehemently enough to be a fit for her cause.

They emerge a clan filthy and wanting, and how Claude will _torment_ them for it later; such high nobility, besmirched and filthy and battle-worn. One at a time, their party throws up their arms to protect from the glare of sunlight, breathes the fresh monastery air. There are sounds of relief as they spill out in full, away from Abyss' stench.

(They’ve been guided to the surface by the curious, beautiful one, though he for one does not touch the Goddess’ mid-afternoon light. His gaze slices them to ribbons as he stops just shy of the entryway and turns back to the sewage, the hunger, the _dark_ from whence he came.)

They emerge just in time for mid-afternoon tea, and the grounds are cluttered with students. Somewhere across the courtyard there is a scream.

"Guess that's one way to make an entrance," Claude remarks. His fingers twine behind his head, and his viper's smile surveys the commotion they've caused.

Students amass and crowd the newcomers, and in the swarm, Edelgard slips free of their interrogation. Sunlight is an assault on her gentle lilac eyes, and still she forces them open, scours the crowds as they build and call for friends. Edelgard ignores them all. She is looking for Hubert.

Finally, from the masses, his figure too. Hubert appears particularly gaunt beneath the brilliance of the autumn sun as he shoves the smaller students away. There is something untamed in his actions.

“ _Lady Edelgard_.”

He towers over her, and Edelgard squares her shoulders lest anybody see the way she itches to throw her arms about his steepled shoulders, to press tight to his hollow chest, for this is the longest she’s been away from his side since that stretch in the cold; in the dark; in the foul reek of blood.

“Yes, Hubert?” She asks instead, even, and meets his gaze.

“Do not _yes_ me.” He chastises her as though a child, and in those wild green eyes Edelgard recognizes fear. “In what cause have you seen such worth to vanish without a trace? To what end, the panic you have wrought?”

His voice carries, and from some steps away, Edelgard is all too aware of the way Dimitri watches them. Her fingers curl at her side, restless and undone—Hubert's worry and weakness for them all to see. She takes Hubert by the elbow and leads him away from any prying ears. If he's taught her any one thing, it’s to trust discriminately. And so she will. Thanks to Hubert, she will survey with scrutiny every being who crosses her path. When they bow to her with a hand behind their back, she will check it for a blade.

“To the _end_ of a mystery,” she tells Hubert more gently, as they reach the shadows of the yard. Quieter. “One you might like to know about, if you are finished scolding me as though I am a gradeschooler."

Hubert’s face, as though he’s caught his tongue between his teeth, and Edelgard might be filthy, might be aching, might have had to sleep upon a wooden slab for a week now but she smiles at the unnatural contortion, for Hubert may spin together the foulest words for nearly anybody else but never with her.

Clouds obscure the sun; beneath its heat, they evaporate until light dapples through. The crowds trickle away at the influence of the Lords, and how very unsurprising that they are more popular than she, because Edelgard might be royalty but she is no man; for matching their strength, she is labeled villain, labeled worse, for the way blood burns in her veins.

But no matter, Edelgard thinks, for the ancient brick walls of the first floor dormitories are with just enough nooks and crannies to recount a story in privacy.

And so she pulls Hubert aside and tells him all.

  
Later that evening she lingers in the library, fingers trailing aimlessly along the ridged leathered spines. A whisper against the wooden floorboards does her pause, and when she glances behind her shoulder, Hubert is there.

Bathed, she thinks, as is she too at long last. Hubert gleams in a certain way beneath the library's candlelight that scrambles the words at the tip of her tongue. And he looks at her as she looks back at him, purposeful and intent and disinterested that has been caught. Perhaps they are beyond that. Perhaps they’ve together amassed so many secrets that they can withdraw from behind their respective batallions, expose to one another the sensitive flesh of their necks.

“Rather late to be playing the spy, isn’t it?” Edelgard asks him, and resumes her work. Her finger along the sleek spines of the bound books. Embossed gold letters shine in the library’s low light. “Then again, if you are resorting to even more underhanded means to keep tabs on me, it may be too early for those.”

“If it were up to me, I would not allow you leave my sight again.”

“You speak of _allow_ as though you’re of royal blood and I your aide.”

“Do not hide behind your status," Hubert snaps. "Princess or no, you must account for your decisions. You actions were baseless, and without an ounce of consideration.”

There's a quiver in his voice, and Edelgard peers back at him. From over her shoulder, from just far enough into the shadows, he might appear as sinister and unbecoming as ever, the carefully cultivated visage of Vestra. But in his tight shoulders, the strain of his worry is clear as day, and it makes her ache.

“We were pulled in before we understood what was happening; there were no talks of should, or the surface, or those we left behind. There was no intention to cause a fuss.”

“And yet you did.”

He steps towards her, foregoing the shadow in which he is so comfortable for the honest light. Candles flicker and sputter upon their aged, bronze prickets. In their glow, Edelgard can see the agony that has cut deep into his face. Caverns forge beneath reddened eyes. A valley savages the plane between his brows.

Hubert, worried. Hubert, frightened, manic. It strikes Edelgard in the middle of her chest. And she can no longer stand for their formalities, not when he is standing here at her mercy, aching, not when she has spent nights wishing for him, wanting him, her protection from the danger of dark. And so she places the flat of her palm against his cheek. And though he twitches at the shock of it, he does not pull away. Rather, those lines falter. Behind his eyes, Edelgard can see the wheels of his thoughts spin.

Careful things. Intricate things. Sometimes, Edelgard watches Hubert at the desk beside her as Hanneman drones at the classroom's head and wonders just how he came to be so terribly sharp. Whether he wandered the forests as a child, and snatched it from a passing fae like a child in a storybook. Whether it originated from a hidden, enchanted treasure dug up on a strange voyage, a curse that clings to him still, burrowed into his bones.

But neither of those are possible—for every day of his childhood, he was at her side.

“My Hubert,” she sighs, such a tender endearment hidden away in the foresaken library. “Truly, I did not mean to worry you so.”

Her words send a shudder through him. He closes his eyes, and for a moment, Edelgard’s fingers give as he presses closer. She wonders how long it’s been since he has slept. If he’d thought of it at all, in her days beneath the surface.

In an instant, his fingers join Edelgard’s in their exploration. They trace her knuckles; the nails; the warm center of her palm. They press her deeper against his jaw, desperate.

The touch is reverence, and heat creeps up Edelgard's collar. For the ways they’ve protected one another, he’s never given indication to want to touch her like this. She draws closer to him of her own accord. Here, obscured from any onlooking students or wary men of Seiros, the panic in his breaths is uncontained.

“You searched for me,” she breathes. "You worried for me."

"Achingly. Desperately." His fingers tremble through the leather of his gloves. “I’d have torn apart the monastery if I had to.”

_“Hubert.”_

“Do not _doubt_ me. I’d have burned them to ash if it helped to uncover your location. I’d have had their corpses crumbling beneath the heel of my boot.”

His voice is fraught with terror, and it tugs at her throat. They stand together, still bound by the lengths of Edelgard’s fingers, to the passing glance of a stranger two mere shadows amongst the timeless, sweeping shelves. For what would a passerby know of the devotion that simmers beneath their fingertips? What would a stranger understand of the way they huddle in dark corners and speak in whispers of how they will tear up the very fabric of the world?

Edelgard looks at him and wonders if he’s already killed for her. She looks deep into the ferocious lines of Hubert von Vestra’s face and wonders if he might die for her one day, too.

She takes Hubert into her arms and squeezes with abandon.

-

Edelgard and Hubert are alone, standing bloodied and worn on opposite sides of a burlap tent.

Outside the folds come the sounds of a land ravaged by war. At times, a shout punctuates the silence; the scream of an enemy felled and dying. Hubert had warned Edelgard of this fact; that the aftermath of battle carries long into the realm of peace.

She has prepared for it well. Outside, Edelgard knows ash to rain from the skies, fires to blaze on the slope where they have just fought. It was an uphill fight—figuratively and literally, with their troops situated at the base of the mountain and trailing upward. And still, men and women and beasts alike had fallen to Edelgard’s axe, the weapons of her troops, her cause.

She wears victory in the blood caked around her jaw and nose, she wears victory in the way her eyes burn.

“It was incredible to witness,” Hubert tells her from his spot near the doorway. He’s entered no worse for wear than Edelgard herself, his cloak stitched high around his neck, bringing with him the sharp scents of burned hair and cloth and flesh. Earlier, mere movements of his long, blackened fingers had commanded meteoric balls of flame upon those who had so foolishly stood in their way. And oh, but Edelgard can still rememer the screams. “A fearsome sight.”

“The battle?”

“Yes, the battle too.” He waves away Edelgard’s suggestion as though it were a mere gnat in the air. “But I speak of you, Lady Edelgard. A crimson blight upon thieir delusions of right, of safety. Terrible and beautiful, more so than I can put into words.”

“Your poetry is meaningless in the fields of war, Hubert. That I intimidated is enough for me.”

“I think not.” He steps forward; outside the tarp, yet another scream rings out, quickly cut short. A part of the battle Edelgard need not sully herself with, Hubert had told her earlier. _Cleanup_. “Poetry is many things, Lady Edelgard, that cannot be confined to a page of parchment or a collector’s tome. Had you seen yourself out there, you’d have thought so too.”

“Perhaps I’d have been less certain against an enemy I recognized.” His praise sits heavy upon her shoulders, weighs her into the earth more than Edelgard’s sense of obligation ever has. That her ailing father thinks of her and her battles and wishes her well, that her country needs her, that the world claws and nips at her ankles to forge a path for them all, is nothing in comparison to a compliment from Hubert’s lips. Edelgard straightens her skirts, stiffened with enemy blood. “Perhaps if we had fought against Dimitri—or the professor—"

“Think nothing of it.” He’s on her in three quick strides, wrenching her fingers from their restless motions. “You will take down every last one. You will come out on top.”

His certainty fills the cavity of her chest to bursting. And Edelgard wonders, as she has countless times prior, how Hubert can look into her face and speak so certainly. How he can _trust_ as he does in the new world they forge.

For they’re no longer students of Garreg Mach, pouring in secret over heavy tomes of strategy and warfare. No longer are they children with the tint of youth and inexperience to keep them from harm. He had killed that day—and so had she. And the ground had run red.

“How do you know?” She asks him. And in the eery quiet of the war’s aftermath, she works her fingers about Hubert’s wrists and grips them as tightly as he is onto her. “Tell me, how do you keep your faith when the world turns black, when ruin rains down upon our shoulders, when it is only you and I who stand on the brink?”

“Because it is you, Lady Edelgard,” he tells her simply. “In you, I’ve never found reason to doubt.”

The wind plucks up on the battlefield beyond; soon, the fires will be blown out, and they will mount their horses and descend to Enbarr. Soon, Edelgard will stand upon her dais and make her declaration of war, and afterwards she will turn to be immersed in Hubert’s proud smile. But for now, she aches and reeks and trembles in her fright and joy of what they've just done. For now, she wants to neglect those very obligations; there is one thing further she cares about.

She draws him in; she takes to the tips of her boots. Edelgard’s mouth meets Hubert’s in a long-awaited sigh. And as he drops her wrists in lieu of his fingers instead dragging along her neck, her waist, she reciprocates in turn to weave her hands into the loose inky curls atop his head and pull him close. For he has always been her _person_ , for she has longed to kiss him since she understood kissing to be an act of love, and Edelgard thinks she may finally see her path.

-

Edelgard and Hubert are alone, and the tension between them curls and undulates and sparks. Edelgard and Hubert twine in the expansive Emperor’s bed, a trail of clothing blissfully abandoned in their wake, and should they set on fire and burn and die right here, Edelgard will have perished without regret.

For years, she thinks, she has known Hubert to love her. That he loves her in the pride that contorts his face, hollowing now as boy becomes man, as student becomes Minister, as apprentice becomes master. She understands him to love her in the nights he still insists on remaining awake to watch over her so that she might rest, so that she might rise the following morning at all, so that her bedsheets remain unsullied by her own wet, hot blood. She knows him to love her in the lashing challenges he casts towards Adrestia’s tacticians and generals over the War Room table, as he demands better from them, always better for Emperor Edelgard.

She knows him to love her in the very words he’d spoken to her just two weeks prior, words that have since dug deep roots into Edelgard’s mind, into the light of her very soul, and burned and _burned_ until she catches herself short of breath, pressed against the cool stone walls of Enbarr’s keep, unable to think for the way they consume her. That she is the one he loves, again and again in time with her pulse.

They kiss in the evenings as they have since the inception of the war, when he leans over heavy parchments to correct an error or make a gentle note and Edelgard cannot help but seize at the want in her gut. But the slide of their lips and dip of tongue into the wet heat of one anothers' mouths cannot quell the way his words have had had her reeling, incendiary. And so this night when he'd neared her, she had not let him away, not even for breath.

That he had responded enthusiastically is all of the permission she needs, and when his fingers settle carefully on her waist, Edelgard tastes frustration. Never has she felt satisfied with his feathered touch when she understands him to be capable of such great strength. And so despite the way nerves wrack her core she presses to his chest and coaxes him to her until her back is flat upon the table, until his eloquent words are rendered useless and he shakes against her just as violently as she.

And when she unfastens his buttons, there is something in the strangled, wretched way he moves. And she sees he has not just been devoted to her in mind, but in body, too.

“Am I to be your first, Hubert?” She asks, working away his cravat.

He laughs something breathless and deep, a flush crept so high upon his cheekbones that it is swallowed by coils of hair. “That you would be my first, my only—is a reality beyond my greatest imaginations.”

“Then together we shall make it so,” Edelgard swears to him. And her fingers curl around his neck, her thumbs wind up his hollow cheeks, and she makes it a promise. Tries to impose upon him the importance of those silly, trivial words.

“I cannot.” Agony in his voice as his body curves over hers, trembling in restraint and indulgence. Long lines of her own silver hair catch on his lips. “To take that from you would be a sin.”

Chivalry. How quaint. “And precisely what I want,” Edelgard tells him back, and wrenches apart his jacket, his undershirt underneath. Hot, wanting breaths pass between Hubert’s teeth.

“If you—desire me,” he relents at long last.

Edelgard has never wanted anything more ferociously in all her days.

One might think it monstrous, the way he plucks her up by her thighs, carries her to the bed with such ease. That as his clothes shed, as he leans over her, his eery eyes gleam in a way that can only be described as hungry. But for the horrors Edelgard has witnessed of her Minister, for the way blackened lines of unresolved, unabsorbed ruin crawl up his fingers, hands, and arms, she understands him to be simply _man_ , for there is a horror in mankind beasts have yet to capture, evils fouler and more acidic than the fight for food, for survival.

She’s been warned against him by those who know him, been pulled into the darker corners of the Keep or hailed at a roadside as her horse carries her to and fro and told of the horrors of which the great Minister Vestra is truly capable, that she must stay away if for her own good, if for her own purity of character. And how Edelgard wants to laugh in their faces—and how some times she has. She has not been pure since she has writhed and coiled on stone floors wet with the blood of her kin and been mutated, mutilated.

They may see her for an Empress, skin like snow and hair like spun sugar and ideals that scrape the high clouds of a clear day, but such is not the case. Hubert nurses the rotted heart inside her chest. He takes it out, weighs it in a cage of fingers, and pronounces it divinity.

The bedding is a velveteen and satin nest, and Hubert’s knees dig deep into the pretty bedclothes as he kneels over her now. And for the way Enbarr’s blissful, cool winters should prick at the skin, the heat between their bodies sears relentless. Edelgard’s jaw is nudged upwards as he trails a long line of lip along the flesh. They are hasty movements—unkempt and fast and hungry, and she nearly laughs then and there with her lover between her legs, with her body so close to womanhood. Had she suspected this of him, she’d have kissed him like that earlier. Had she suspected Hubert capable of this want, she’d have had him the moment she was able.

Had they not squirreled away in the darker corners of Garreg Mach, had they not spun a glorious, _perfect_ future between themselves like the tenuous threads of a spider’s web, she might have even noticed his eyes roaming her as they do now. The desire etched onto the premature lines of his face.

He was beautiful then too, and he is beautiful now.

He takes her body in his hands, and does away with her clothing. Those ruinous fingers trail the scars that encase Edelgard’s limbs, snakelike. Edelgard lays back upon the bedspread, silver hair fanned across the deep hue of vermilion, the color of the blood he’s spilled in her eternal name. And when she takes him in full, oh, she sees stars.

Once, they’d knotted fingers upon her childhood bed and his seastill eyes had burned and he’d sworn to Edelgard to protect her youth. Now, his fingers curl in hers, they press her arms back into the mattress, bliss and shock sears between her legs, and he takes what remains of it.

Some territories up, Edelgard knows a war to wage, a war of her own craft, a war that has her tasting the possibility of a life worth living. Some territories up she understands men and women to die for the world she and Hubert had fallen in love with, whispered into fruition amongst the dusty shelves of Garreg Mach’s library. 

But what is an empire to Hubert’s touch? What is it to stand and face her enemies if not for Hubert’s presence at her shoulder? In her bliss, she takes his face in long fingers. Their eyes meet in a searing moment of clarity.

“I love you as well,” she tells him. And oh, how she means it.

-

Torchlight casts a wan hue upon the stone paraphets of Enbarr’s Keep; beyond, shadow creeps up the walls like an intruder. It brings with it a tension, thick and tangible in otherwise still midnight air. And Edelgard is alone.

The winds of change. Edelgard thinks from this spot with her fingers tight on the stone, she can taste them now. Them, and the blood carried by the northern winds, the blood of her own, felled by the Beast King and his army on his way to the glorious gates of Enbarr.

He will arrive within the day. And he will taste the wrath of a woman who has known nothing but the betrayal of men; a woman scorned, a woman dehumanized, a woman altered.

Fear has chilled Edelgard to the bone, but it is fury that sparks the tears that quell hot and unbidden in her eyes.

“Emperor,” says a voice behind her, and she nearly jumps at the immediacy of it.

“Hubert. You may approach.”

Relief, tangible and sweet through her veins. Hubert, her Hubert. If he is here at her side then she can conquer anything, even this infinite void of terror, of anticipation.

“You were to sleep,” comes his voice, a gentle scorn. She dismisses it.

“I couldn’t. I _won’t_." Her gloved fingers flick, restless, over the paraphets. She draws them back soon lest the creeping void take them too. “On such nights, there is nothing to do but wait for them to be over. Sleep will not be taking me.”

Hubert merely hums. “I see.” And he steps forward, so that he is beside her, and draws in a breath. His eyes narrow as they peer into the black beyond where they stand. “The wind reeks of blood.”

“I was just thinking the same.”

“It all tastes the same, you know.” His voice is certain. “On the eve before a great battle. Win or lose, the air carries an iron tang when one’s death is so close.”

“You say win or lose so casually. Speak of them as though you’re facing your opponent across a chessboard.”

“Am I not, in a matter of speaking?” But for the tang of blood on the air they might be engaging in banter—flirting, even, as they’ve made habit of as of late, when they linger too long in the war room, when sun soaks the tapestries and has Hubert’s hair gleaming and she simply cannot resist a sugared word, an indulgent touch.

“I don’t know.” And finally, a tremor shakes her voice, and her fingers hold onto the paraphets so tightly it is a surprise the stone does not crumble underneath the weight of her fear. And Edelgard keeps her gaze on the nothing at their front, because if she were to look at Hubert it might be all over, if she thinks of tomorrow, if she thinks of _what ifs_ , it alone will spell her very end. She has never felt so much terror. She has never felt so powerless. “Chess pieces are at the command of their masters—they are simple, easy things. They do as they are told. They are poor representations of man, are they not? They do not know what it’s like to crave blood.”

His voice still inscrutable.“Strip away the erroneous factors, and man too is predictable and easy to command.”

“I hope you’re right.”

Later, perhaps, Edelgard will take Hubert by his fingers and lead him into her bed, and she will fuck him hard and fuck him well and do her best to sear the feeling of pleasure into her very bones, the sensation of love. And she will look down at him from her spot mounted and press away tomorrow’s final war, she will look at the way his facade cracks and burns only for her and understand herself adored beyond all reason, beyond all doubt.

But for now they will remain, as always, as _ever_ ; side-by-side, Edelgard and Hubert face the dark terror of tomorrow and breathe the blood carried by the winds and understand themselves on the brink of something broken.

  
They stay awake the entirety of the night. She has him time and time again until their desire is spent, until they lay upon the pillows and the room turns pink and the dread coils slow and heavy around Edelgard’s throat like a noose.

Hubert has been quiet company, and this morning feels so strongly of nights in the academy that Edelgard wonders in a moment of mania if they are not back in the bedrooms of Garreg Mach, if she’s not fallen asleep at the table and dreamed all of this. Might Hubert awaken her then, with careful fingers along her face, indulging in the way he can touch her under the guise of her service? Might he gather her into his arms and walk her to her room for a few hours’ rest before classes begin? Might she be deposited in her own bed and turn into the pillows knowing herself safe, with the smell of Hubert on her fingers, in her hair?

She shifts in his arms now, and he allows a low hum from his throat in reciprocation. She wonders if he, too, is thinking of those happier nights.

Likely not. Likely, he is planning each step of today’s battle, gathering his hungers for blood and listing his black spells. Edelgard smiles, and looks towards him.

Beautiful, the way the light of dawn strikes him. For his worship of her, he appears every part an angel. Displaced dust dances around inkwell hair as his gaze meets hers. His eyes are lively and green, tourmaline.

“We’re not needed yet, Elle.”

“Perhaps not. But they’ll come to wake us soon enough.”

“You must rest while you can.”

“My weariness cannot be sated with one night’s rest. Not now.”

She rises to her knees, and settles upon his thighs, her own battle-kissed skin against his own. Edelgard takes Hubert’s morning-roughened jaw in her fingertips and kisses him gently. Tears drip down her cheeks.

She licks in between his lips and wonders if today he will die for her. The thought is a lance between her ribs.

More. Edelgard leans into him, leans into her Hubert as she has since the fateful inception of their relationship in this achingly quick life, and digs her nails into his neck. His hum in return is a warning; any more, and he will be ready for her again.

“Do you think the dead remember that they’ve been loved?” Edelgard asks him quietly, as they finally pull away.

It doesn’t appear Hubert was expecting that one. He blinks at her, a frown etched between his brows. She watches as he takes in the trails of moisture down her cheeks; the fear that contorts her face. To anybody else, she might look as she always does. But not to Hubert. No, Hubert has always known.

“I believe it depends on the ferocity of the love,” he tells her after a moment’s contemplation. His fingers catch her chin; as before, his thumb presses into her lips. “In which case, if you don’t mind me saying, you and I will carry ours long beyond our graves. Whenever or wherever Lady Death might find us.”

“Hubert von Vestra. Don’t let your enemies know that beneath that seemingly impermeable exterior, you’re a romantic at heart.”

He smiles.

Enswathed in the silks of her bedsheets she may be a lover, a woman, a mortal, but Edelgard steps to the cool stone floors head held high and tasting this morning’s battle, every part an emperor above even death.

-

Edelgard and Hubert are surrounded by clashing bodies, the screams of felled men and the shrieking of beasts. And still, somehow, they are still alone.

Ruin. That is perhaps the best way she can think of it. To see Hubert lanced through the stomach from behind, the thick red waterfall of blood from his front. Ruin like a bottom stone cracking and spelling the calamity of a building, a kingdom; ruin like the molten magma seeping from the mouth of a volcano, devouring all. Ruin like the tide crashing, dragging children out to sea. Ruin, of knowing black and only black, of wanting to die, of wanting to destroy.

Edelgard flies from her horse and lands in the muck underfoot just before he falls. She takes him sure and steady in her arms.

“Hubert. Oh Goddess, _No_ —"

A sound of protest from him, but she will not acknowledge it now. That he would tell her to fight on is laughable. She takes him underneath the arm, and drags him from the thick of battle. They leave a bloody trail in their wake.

He falls to the ground with a sense of finality that curdles in her throat.

No. _No_. She kneels beside him and presses her hands to his wound, until blood sops in the spaces between her fingers. Would that she could water her gardens with this vermilion, with him, grow him anew.

It’s as his fingers trace her cheek that she realizes she’s crying.

“The forces need their commander,” he breathes, ragged.

“The forces can stand on their own for a minute.”

He coughs, and blood paints his lips scarlet.

“It’s been my greatest honor—“

“Don’t speak. Preserve your strength.” Don’t you leave, don’t you dare die on me, don’t you leave, don’t you _go_ —

His eyes flash. “We both know this is my end, Edelgard.”

_Call me Elle—_

Her tears drip as wet and heavy as he bleeds. Shuddering fingers hold onto his hands. He’s growing colder as the moments pass.

“Elle,” He begins again, and suppresses a cough, though his breaths come hot and fast and uneven. “It has been my divine pleasure—to serve. To love you as I have.”

She grits her teeth so tightly they squeak, and sacrifices his fingers in lieu of his face. Her hands paint his own blood across his ghastly flesh.

“To have been loved by you, protected by you, served by you—“ Words she’d never thought to have to say. “Has been the greatest honor of my being.”

His lashes flutter; his breath shudders and halts. And yet a gloved finger touches her chin. “You are a thing beautiful,” he heaves. “A thing divine.”

_You_ have made me beautiful, Edelgard wants to say, to scream. She wants to take his bloodied, whitening face in her hands and shake him so that he might find alertness once more. _You_ have made me divine. If not for her anchor, into what waters might she have drifted? If not for the understanding quiet between them both, what sort of monster might she have envisioned herself when her craving for blood and retribution bubbled, acidic, in her throat?

Hubert’s hand falls, taking with it the foundations of her very person, of this whole world. Peace smooths over his body.

And Edelgard screams.

She screams until her throat is raw, until her voice shatters and her Crests sing their deadly curse into her veins. She screams until she finds the will to stand again, to turn across the fields strewn with the corpses of her own men and face the northern tide careening her way.

The sky is blue like bliss, and sunlight glints on spilt blood and cobblestones about Enbarr’s Keep, and Hubert is dead.

Let them come.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [Twitter!](https://www.twitter.com/iliawrites)


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